Linode are Consistently Awesome

I’ve been with Linode as my VPS host for around 18 months now, and since I put a site monitor on it (via the also-awesome siteuptime.com) – every month I get an email saying this (with suitable Month/Year substitutions!):

Dear r3dux,

Below is your monthly uptime report for May 2012

Please do not reply to this email.
For further assistance, please contact support@siteuptime.com.

Linode don’t oversell their capacity. What you’re paying for isn’t purely the VPS, it the entire package of the VPS + highly trained professional engineers + staff capacity to deal with issues promptly and efficiently, or take it up the chain to an engineer if the problem can’t be resolved straight away.

And get 3 cheap & wobbly VPS’ and replicate content across them? I’d rather not… ;)

It’s all horses for courses – but Linode have been exceptional for me, so I’m sticking with them.

Neither does BuyVM, they’re actually well known for this reason. The main difference is that Linode runs their company as a business, while BuyVM staffers do it because they believe everyone should have access to a VPS, and enjoy what they do. They have over 10k clients and 6 staff members, getting away with it mainly because it’s an unmanaged VPS system. Tickets are responded to within 24 hours, though. The people who work at these companies have been managing servers for a very long time, and the only reason I’m calling out BuyVM in this post is because they’re leading the VPS technology world (they’ve been the first to introduce OVZ features that no one else has, such as supporting Ubuntu 12.04 on the release day, while every other provider had issues). My uptime regularly goes beyond 100 days, and this is with checks every minute, compared to the (I’m assuming) free version of the software you’re using, which checks every 30 minutes. If my VPS goes down (due to network connectivity), it goes down for ~2 minutes on average. Different strokes for different folks, as you said. But I would at least try a BuyVM server so you can try both services, and see for yourself as I did.